Dana Blankenhorn

Etymology of the Crazy

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The Crazy is an important element in our political history.

It appears like clockwork, every generation or so. It is a politics that denies reality, creates its own facts, and when reality gets in the way of ideology it rejects reality.

Hippies played that game, until Kent State and the 1972 Nixon landslide caused them to drop out. Fascists played that game, insisting democracy could not survive until it crushed them in World War II. Populists played that game until The Grange became Jim Crow. And of course "The Lost Cause" was all about that game.

So the fact that conservatives are playing that game right now doesn't surprise me. The fact that one in three Republicans are inclined to oppose anyone who accepts the President's birthplace as Hawaii does not surprise me. It's only the fact that the pundit class is shocked, shocked by all this that surprises me. They all flunked history.

It's in the nature of ideology to believe your own hype, to deny the reality of things in order to sustain a vision. The problem with communism, and Islamism, and feudalism, and all the other -isms that plague and have plagued our world down the centuries is that they won't admit of correction, a correction democracy insists upon. Democracy works because reality intrudes and leaders are changed, so lies can't stand.

The etymology of this particular crazy should be clear by now.

It's Bush-ism.

Soft on Crime

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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For decades Republicans have bashed Democrats with the idea that they're “soft on crime.”

It worked. America now has a bigger percentage of its people in jail, or under the direct control of courts, than any other country. We execute more people than China (far more), and our police have many tools that violate the spirit, if not the actual language, of the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th and 8^th amendments.

(NOTE: The execution numbers actually favor China, although our incarceration rates are still highest on an absolute and per-capita basis.)

Despite what anyone in the media may tell you, street crime is down.  Total crimes peaked in 1991. They're now down by nearly a third, even though we have 70 million more people, even despite the terrible economy.

The War on Street Crime has been won.

But there has been a wave of much bigger crimes throughout our society. These are crimes conducted by business, often with just a pen. The economic crash of 2008 was caused by such crimes. Everyone suffered from it – except for the criminals.

Why the Economy Still Sucks (And Why It Won't For Much Longer)

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This is not an April Fool's joke. Abundance is coming. The hard times are ending for good. But the hole Republicans got us into is a profound one, and making the turn from this crisis will take time.

There are two reasons why economic growth remains low, despite good policies which have staved off a second Great Depression:

1. Money Remains Underemployed
2. The New Game Hasn't Scaled Yet.

I have solutions for both problems today. Let's take them one at a time.

Money Remains Underemployed

There's plenty of capital around, but it is sitting in short-term storage. It's unemployed. Money managers say they're “preserving capital,” when what they should be doing is risking capital in hopes of a gain.

How do we bring that capital out and put it to work?

Inflation.

 

Bizarro Nixon and The Next Revolt

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When I say this President is going down the Nixon Road, a lot of people get upset on both sides of the divide.

It's mainly because they misunderstand Nixon.

Liberals see him as evil, as the paranoid with the enemy's list, as Watergate. Conservatives see him as shifty, as inconstant, and would much rather talk about Ronald Reagan.

But all Watergate did was delay the changes Nixon stood for. And Reagan could not have succeeded without Nixon.

Nixon turned the ship around. He came to office in a liberal era and left in a conservative one. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because he engineered it, tacking steadily into the liberal wind, feeding his own side mainly rhetoric, putting in place political assumptions we still live with, and that Reagan took full advantage of.

This President is having to do the same thing Nixon did, in reverse. While Democrats won in 2006 and 2008, they won in a conservative electorate. Fact is, our assumptions about right-and-wrong, or right-and-left, haven't really changed. That's why, in the absence of anything like a coherent program from the President last year, the knees jerked once again – they're used to it.

What the President is trying to turn around is more than a policy. It's those assumptions which Nixon put in place 40 years ago, about how our political world works. The assumption of ill will on the part of both sides. The assumption of enemies held by both sides. Until that assumption is challenged and defeated, American democracy is under grave threat.

So the President comes to every press conference in a relaxed frame of mind. He doesn't try to offer simple answers. He admits things are complicated. He calls for negotiation. He doesn't offer any instant anything. He says real answers take time. This didn't happen all at once and we won't fix it all at once.

The Republican victories last year were actually very good news. For Democrats. Warning against what someone might do seldom works. Fighting against what they are doing works better.

What the end of the Nixon era has created is a bi-polar politics. We rush all the way to the left, and when that doesn't work immediately we rush all the way to the right. Politicians usually think they're in the middle, but in the case of 2010's winners they weren't.

So now those people have to govern. They only have two choices. They can anger the people who sent them there (which is what Democrats elected in 2006 basically did) by taking half a loaf on their goals. Or they can force through massive changes, which is what they're going to try and do now.

Unleash the crazy.

Who's Bob Metcalfe Now? The 1971 Game

Bob Metcalfe (right) may be one of my generation's most important innovators.

His concept of an "Ethernet" is at the heart of your local area network. Ethernet concepts are rolled all over the Internet, and most scaled Web hosts move their data around with it. There are now Ethernet standards running to 10 GBps.

Metcalfe created 3Com in 1980 to commercialize his concept, and while his performance was fine his board kicked him out 10 years later for Eric Benhamou. As with some of my firings, this was probably a blessing in disguise.

Metcalfe's mind is too big, and too wide-ranging, to be locked inside an office. He's a walk around, fly around kind of guy who can do anything. He spent the 1990s as a pundit and journalist, and has spent most of the last decade as a venture capitalist and eminence grise at UT-Austin. I keep hoping he'll "retire" to my alma mater, Rice University in Houston, where he can drive the world's energy giants deeper into the renewables space, but that's just my personal dream for him. At 64 he's still young enough to have dreams of his own.

Metcalfe is the first subject of our new feature, The 1971 Game. In past years I've spent time comparing figures of the present with those of the past, based on my belief that the crisis of our time is a reverse of what happened in the late 1960s. This made Barack Obama into a Bizarro Nixon. It also made figures of what became the Tea Party movement into Bizarro Hippies and Yippies. All this was fun, but in the end it doesn't really explain what was behind the change.

What my research began to reveal last year is that even the changes of the 1960s, which seemed entirely social and political, were in fact economic. And that this pattern of political change driven by economics has in fact repeated itself, time-after-time in our political history.

What makes America great is that it's a business culture. We are not ideological people. We do what works. But what aging, fading industries learned long ago is that they could hang on to economic power by capturing the political process. This is what southern planters did in the 1850s, what railroad barons did in the 1890s, what utility producers did in the 1920s, what manufacturers were actually doing in the 1960s. (What's good for Gemeral Motors is good for the USA.)

Since you can't win an election by running against economic progress, fading industries have spent immense sums creating a host of ancillary issues, associating themselves with causes that appear far afield from what they're about, but whose political alliances magically end up supporting their economic aims. 

Which brings us to the present day.